sferred to the curtain was brightened up
by the addition of green foliage; and deft touches of the scene
painter's brush, without altering the pose of any of the figures,
changed winter into glorious summer. Many a Cooperstown audience,
waiting for the performance to begin, has studied the scene which this
curtain displays, not without wonder that Leather-Stocking is in furs,
and that Judge Temple, in so radiant a summertime, has taken the
precaution to retain his earmuffs.

Natty Bumppo's Cave, a not very remarkable freak of nature which
Fenimore Cooper's pen has made one of the chief points of interest in
the region of Cooperstown, is about a mile from the village, high up on
the hill that rises from the eastern side of the lake. It offers a stiff
climb to the inexperienced, but not to others. It is not much of a
cave, being hardly more than a deep and curiously formed cleft between
the rocks. From the platform of rock over the cave a magnificent view
may be had of the lake and its more distant shores, with the hills
beyond.

[Illustration: _C. A. Schneider_

NATTY BUMPPO'S CAVE]

In _The Pioneers_ Cooper takes advantage of poetic license to enlarge
the cave for the purpose of his story, but the description is exact
enough to identify it with the present Natty Bumppo's cave. In the
summer of 1909 was discovered lower down the hillside another and larger
cave, the small entrance of which, in the woods beyond Kingfisher Tower,
at Point Judith, had long remained unobserved. Here the name of Natty
Bumppo came near being involved in another controversy, for some local
archeologists maintained that the newly discovered cave was the one
which Cooper meant to describe as Natty Bumppo's, being better adapted
to the requirements of the narrative than the one that tradition had
fixed upon.

Cooper might have provided a better cave for Natty Bumppo, but he did
not. On this point the testimony of his eldest daughter, Susan Fenimore
Cooper, is decisive. She was in many ways her father's confidant, and in
his later years closely associated with him in literary work. No other
person has written so intimately of him. In _Pages and Pictures_, which
Miss Cooper published in 1861, she gives a drawing of Natty Bumppo's
cave, and it is the one that has been associated with the tradition and
story of the village down to the present time. It is quite possible,
however, that the cave near Point Judith is the one referred to in the
trad